Thickness and clearance visualization based on distance field of 3D objects

This paper proposes a novel method for visualizing the thickness and clearance of 3D objects in a polyhedral representation. The proposed method uses the distance field of the objects in the visualization. A parallel algorithm is developed for constructing the distance field of polyhedral objects using the GPU. The distance between a voxel and the surface polygons of the model is computed many times in the distance field construction. Similar sets of polygons are usually selected as close polygons for close voxels. By using this spatial coherence, a parallel algorithm is designed to compute the distances between a cluster of close voxels and the polygons selected by the culling operation so that the fast shared memory mechanism of the GPU can be fully utilized. The thickness/clearance of the objects is visualized by distributing points on the visible surfaces of the objects and painting them with a unique color corresponding to the thickness/clearance values at those points. A modified ray casting method is developed for computing the thickness/clearance using the distance field of the objects. A system based on these algorithms can compute the distance field of complex objects within a few minutes for most cases. After the distance field construction, thickness/clearance visualization at a near interactive rate is achieved.